It’s always a good day when you receive a new toy. In my case, my new Yaesu FT-857 arrived this afternoon in amongst the chaos being caused by a flaky smoke detector in the apartment building being triggered by the excessive heat and humidity. It’s a multi-mode mobile HF/VHF/UHF transceiver. This will allow me to take full advantage of my amateur radio license that I briefly mentioned a few days ago.

Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of the wiring I had installed when I re-installed my Kenwood mobile radio a couple of weeks ago, so I didn’t have to spend another two hours fishing wires from the battery through the firewall into the passenger compartment.

Currently, I have my mobile VHF/UHF antenna connected to it, but I don’t have the ATAS-120 auto-tuning HF antenna installed, yet. It seems there are two viable options. One is to buy a mount to put it on the roof, either attached to the roof rack or to the rain gutter somehow. The other is to mount it on the back door, either hooked to the bottom edge of the door or to the spare tire, similar to my bike rack. Mounting it on the back door is more preferable because it would probably have enough clearance to avoid hitting things on the ceiling of my parking garage. If I mount it on the roof, it would probably perform better but there would be a hassle everytime I wanted to enter a parking garage. So, I’m going to explore what options are available to mount it on the spare so that when it’s fully retracted it’s go enough clearance.

If you’ve already gone through the process of mounting an ATAS-120 on a GM Tracker (or Suzuki Sidekick), please let me know. 🙂